This little ditty gets filed under “there are no losers, everybody’s a winner.” You know, because that makes us all somehow more equal and our precious “self-esteem” is inflated. As an example of this mentality, on the local sports radio station a couple of weeks back they were laughing about Youth Hockey leagues in Ontario which have adopted the rule that if you win by more than 5 goals, you “lose”. Then there was that story from the Dallas area a few years ago, where a mother sued one of the school districts because her child did not make cheerleader at her high school. The result: because of the suit the district agreed that everyone who tried out got to be a cheerleader. The result was a very crowded sideline and lots of uniforms. Some of the girls were great at gymnastics and others just sort of jumped around a lot; but at least everyone got to be “equal”. Of course, the taxpayers of the school district had to pick up the tab.

(Note to self: should I sue because I probably would be a better President than Barack Obama? Oh never mind…)

The practical results of these social engineering experiments have already been quite evident; for example take the stark contrast between East and West Berlin before the Wall fell. Or the wonderfully “robust” Soviet economy, an argument against central planning if there ever was one.

Regardless of circumstance, whenever in history this principle has actually been tired the results have always been the same: the less skilled have little incentive to improve their skills in order to avoid such “humiliations” by those more talented than they, while the more gifted tend more towards laziness or complacency, rather than to continue to strive towards excellence. Why go the extra mile if the pay is going to be the same as for the less gifted peer who does not? There simply is no motivation to exert one’s self unnecessarily. And so the entire society falls into neglect and disrepair. Just ask anyone who is old enough to have lived in Eastern Europe before the fall of the USSR.

To use the opposite of a metaphor we used to hear a lot, the ideal of “making everyone equal” in result is the very anthesis of liberty and of the competitive drive necessary to survive in a world where our adversaries look for every opportunity to knock us down a notch. To ignore the fact that the most wealthy societies in World History have always become so because free market trade is akin to ignoring the nourishment required to keep a human being alive. To play on an old metaphor: it is the waning tide which lowers all the boats… Thus the society which strives towards a utopian pipe dream where no one wants or lacks for anything and everyone loves and care for everyone else (i.e. the followers Marxism, Communism, Socialism) always eventually and inevitably devolves to the least common denominator. We have seen it it Mao’s China–now becoming more Capatilist than we are. We have seen it in the USSR and all of the economies behind the Communist Iron Curtain. We see it in North Korea, which is a disgrace. And now we even begin to see it in Western Europe. Except that this time around even the Western Europeans are getting the message. It is only fat, lazy America that seems to have bought into the something for nothing myth. Our current cadre of bandits in Congress and the White House call this “progress” in the name of equality. Hence “Progressives”. (Get it?)

It is telling, though: the man who followed in the “Community Organizing” footsteps of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton–and all the rest of that sad parade of soceital race-baiting leeches–speaks platitudes for “equality” even as he–like Jackson and Sharpton before him–lives like Louis XIV, while holding productive enterprises hostage to extortion. At the urging of the The One and his friends Pelosi and Reid, the bureaucratic cancer of Big Government grows like kudzu, choking out every other form of economic life in its wake. On television they excoriate the private sector for being so “greedy”, yet as the old parable goes, they fail to see the ‘beam’ in their own eye. I always liked Milton Friedman’s take on “greed” in business vs. the “infallibility” of government:

Meanwhile, as Obama fiddles with his golf clubs and Paul McCartney burns for the cameras, unemployment is rampant, the world economy is teetering and the number one sponsor of terrorism on Planet Earth is about to have their hands on nukes. Other than that, it’s all good for the “let them eat cake” President…

It is good St. Obama now is making his intentions clearer–the G20 speech could not have been more telling–especially for those who voted for him under false pretenses. What isn’t good it what always has been true: the goal of the Left is to drain you of your lifeblood–larger percentages of your labor, in effect making you a slave–and does so in the name their false idol of “equality of results”. It is no wonder that our culture seems to have warmed so much to the mythology of the vampire: